12.1” ION ASUS Eee PC 1201N - Memorial Day Sale $464 + Free Shipping
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Saturday, January 30, 2010
We’ve seen the 11.6” ION, Intel Atom N270 powered Samsung N510 benchmarked with Doom 3 last week which turned out to be barely playable and today the ION powered, Atom 230 10-inch netbook we’ve seen in various places gets benchmarked by the folks at Shanzai.com.
Obviously with ION on board, 1080P HD video is capable of playing smoothly. 720p video playback resulted in 42% CPU use while 180p video playback resulted it 65% - 70% CPU usage.
On the gaming side: They tested World of Warcraft. With all effects enabled and with only 1GB RAM they got 10 - 20 FPS. No mention of what resolution they used though, and FPS speeds on lower quality settings. Still, looks barely playable at those frame rates.
Which has me thinking…. I’m wondering how much of a difference an overclocked Atom N280 / dual-core 330 processor will make compared to an Atom N270 / 230 processor.
Source: Shanzai.com
Those Doom 3 benchmarks on the N510 were inaccurate due to the settings in the Nvidia control panel being incorrect. The reviewer has since reposted results with the graphics card configured properly and achieved frame rates of just under 30 at the same resolutions as tested before.
Here is a quote of the original forum post in which he corrected the results (translated from German):
Jörg Brand Inge said:
August 27, 2009 at 9:46 pm
“@ All
Enlighten me on!
in yesterday’s test of Doom were the settings of the Nvidia software (NVIDIA Control Panel) set the slider control on quality.
Today in the test button on the “3D application to decide” that’s the difference.
This benchmark is done correctly this morning once again just now.
640 * 480 Low = 29.5 FPS
640 * 480 Medium = 28.3 FPS
640 * 480 High = 26.04 FPS
The video capture had been running only for the photo processing in the background, the benchmark 3DMark 2001 and Doom have been filmed by the video camera, is to think clearly see the videos at youtube.
Benchmark’s this evening
800 * 600 Low = 29.1 FPS
800 * 600 Medium = 29 2FPS
800 * 600 High = 27.0 FPS
1024 * 768 Low = 28.7 FPS
1024 * 768 medium = 28.3 FPS
1024 * 768 High = 26.7 FPS
Is not this a great value, which clearly speaks for the ION… ”
Sigh, why so many people doing it wrong when it comes to HD playback?
If hardware acceleration was working properly, 1080p videos will use no more than 10-15% of CPU because the Ion GPU does all the heavy work. 720p videos probably will have lower CPU usage.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3562&p=3
“If you configure MPC-HC as I described above you’ll get full hardware acceleration on the Ion board. This is a great way of watching your own ripped content. Without encryption CPU utilization ends up being in the 10 - 14% range, allowing you to even do things in the background while you’re watching a video.”
Peter, I have absolutely no idea what they are doing. As you can see from your own Acer Revo HD decoding video on Youtube, MPC-HC uses very little CPU when decoding 1080p.
no problems Peter… I was really distraught when I saw the original results; my netbook dream almost came crumbling down around me- I had been holding out for the ion platform for so long with the hope of half decent portable gaming! I’m so glad it turned out they weren’t accurate though.
@emir: That gives me *slightly* more hope for the ION platform, but I’m still going to hold out to see what CULV options there will be after Win7. Looks like a few other games were played, with pretty poor results.
Yeah, the CULV processor does offer a performance increase when compared with the atom, but until manufacturers start coupling it with some decent discrete graphics solutions the ion platform, even with the bottlenecking atom, will still offer better gaming performance. This was made apparent with the acer 1410 with the 4500 MHD- the Doom 3 benchmark tests showed the acer to achieve roughly 15FPS, well under those of teh revised N510 test.
As for the other tests done which showed underwhelming performance by the N510 on a number of different games, I can only hope that that reviewer had the graphics settings incorrectly configured as well.